Charles Hoskinson: Cardano will ‘kick Ethereum 2.0’s ass’

It is an open secret within the crypto community that Charles Hoskinson, former co-founder of Ethereumand its creator Vitalik Buterin are not the best of friends. As Hoskinson has stated in the past, the two have parted ways due to disagreements over the further development of Ethereum.

In a new interview with Ben Armstrong, founder of BitBoy Crypto, the Cardano creator again criticized Ethereum 2.0and laid out why his project will be the superior platform in the future. Hoskinson expressed fundamental doubts about the sustainability of ETH 2.0.

Opening the interview, Hoskinson first and foremost criticized Ethereum 2.0‘s scaling model, stating that ETH “has put itself in a position where they’re betting on Optimistic Zk rollups and these other things.” On the differences in terms of scaling, Hoskinson noted that it is much easier for Cardano to achieve a high number of transactions per second (TPS):

“We‘ve chosen a radically different scaling models. And actually I think both of them have the potential working, but I think Vitalik’s are a little bit riskier from an engineering and research point of view. This is why it is so difficult for them to get Eth 2.0 out. They have chosen to shard all that stuff. We dont have to shard. We can get a thousand TPS on the base level and adding Hydra we can get to whatever we want. […] Because of UTXO Cardano is much easier to shard.”

Cardanos advantages: Higher TPS, on-chain governance and more developers

Fundamentally, the Ethereum 2.0 approach is also very risky and not sufficiently scientifically proven, Hoskinson said. He expressed doubt that such a much more complex system will translate into higher throughput and scalability later on:

“The science is not good yet. There are a lot of trade-offs. They actually go from a half to a third Byzantine fault tolerance, there are viability problems and there are all kinds of new attacks that probably going to occur. So, it‘s much more complex under the hood. Then it’s not clear to me how that much more complex system is going to result in that much higher throughput and scalability.”

However, Hoskinson sees the biggest problem with Ethereum 2.0 in the lack of an on-chain governance system. The Cardano creator predicts Ethereum could face similar problems with upgrade adoption, just as Bitcoin has. “The bigger you get, the harder it becomes if there is no governance system. So you lose your competitive advantage, your ability to upgrade. Were seeing that with Bitcoin,” Hoskinson stated.

On Ethereum, each DeFi project, Hoskinson cited MakerDAO as an example, has to create its own governance model. On Cardano, projects can use the native on-chain governance of the Cardano blockchain. Ultimately, he said, on-governance is even more important than scalability in the long run:

'It‘s less about scalability […], it’s much more about governance. When we look at the next 3 to 5 years, and we have a massive advantage along with the Tezos guys in that respect because we made it a priority.

Hoskinson also argued that Cardano has a better and realistic approach to bringing the 22.6 million software developers worldwide into the Cardano ecosystem. Solidity, Ethereums programming language is only used by 80,000 developers worldwide, which will greatly slow down adoption. Cardano can bring all 22.6 million developers into its ecosystem in a few years:

“We have a much better, much more realistic approach to bring in mainstream developers. […] From a testing and correctness viewpoint, we win because we embraced formal methods. I think we win from a diversity viewpoint because we brought non-blockchain developers into the crypto space. We thought about off-chain and on-chain modules much better than they thought about it. We have a better solution in that respect.”

Hoskinsons message to Vitalik Buterin

In typical Charles Hoskinson fashion, the IOHK CEO concluded:

“So in other words, we kicked their ass. So It‘s actually a question of growth. Can we grow this year？ And that’s what we are doing this year. We are fighting hard.”

Fittingly, IOHK yesterday announced a new “Vertical Strategy” to raise the awareness of Cardano.